The Snake Stone (26 page)

P
ALEWSKI
put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Look here,” he said, breathing hard. “Are we going far? A long way?”

The boy looked up and nodded.

“In that case,” the ambassador said firmly, “we’ll take a chair.”

He snapped his fingers at a couple of men squatting against a wall.

“My treat,” he said, smiling. “Just point these fellows in the right direction, there’s a good boy.”

Down on the shore they swapped the chair for a caïque. The little boy pointed up the Golden Horn.

“Fener? Balat? Fener stage, boatman, please.” Perhaps Yashim had simply gone off home, he thought. But once they reached Fener, the little boy made some complicated signs and shook his head vigorously.

“All right,” Palewski said. “We’ll walk, I see. Not too far now, eh?”

He regretted taking the boy’s advice as he toiled up the hills, but they were in a shabby neighborhood that Palewski did not know, and there were no lounging chairmen here.

Finally the boy jumped up onto a low wall and sat there, kicking his heels and looking intently at a doorway across the street.

“He went in there?”

Palewski climbed the steps. There was a padlock on the door, so Palewski turned around and caught the boy’s eye. He pointed at the door. The little boy nodded.

Palewski glanced up and down the street. Apart from the little boy on the wall, it seemed perfectly empty.

Stanislaw Palewski, unlike Dr. Millingen, was not a man who placed much faith in the benefits of regular exercise. His arms were thin; his legs were long. But he was still capable of sudden, violent physical effort.

He stood back, leaned against the parapet, and doubled those long legs by bringing his knees up close to his chin.

Then with a splintering crash he brought both feet down hard on the door and burst it open.

The ambassador turned to the little boy, who was watching him with astonishment from across the street, and gave him a most unambassadorial wink.

Then he went into the icy gloom to find his friend.

Y
ASHIM
was singing an old song from the Balkans, about a man who went down to the river and caught the soul of his dead lover in his nets.

He spun slowly in the darkness, sometimes kicking his legs, sometimes reaching for a better grip on the man who had become his new friend. They’d only just met, too, he thought. Dear Xani! Stinking, buoyant, and obliging. What very good luck it was they’d met, at last.

If only Xani were still warm, Yashim thought dreamily. The pit was slowly filling, deeper and deeper as the flow backed up against the cloak and stones overhead. He heard a tapping, unlike the sound of water gushing into the pit from the blocked conduit above. For some minutes he tried to imagine what it could be, before he discovered that it was the sound of his own chattering teeth.

He found that his whole body was shaking, convulsing in sudden spasms that shook his grip on the dead man and sometimes sent him spluttering and flailing beneath the surface of the ice-cold water. Sometimes he had a sense of being underwater altogether; sometimes he closed his eyes and felt a wave of great lassitude and peace wash through him, so that he wanted to let go and sink, gently and dreamily, into the depths. He had not touched the bottom of the pit in hours, it seemed. Now and again he found himself beneath the spout of water dropping from the blocked conduit.

He heard someone singing an old Turkish marching song, in a small, tired voice. He thought it must be Xani. Then he supposed it was him. Either way it no longer mattered. He could not feel his legs.

But he must have drifted off into another pit, because the spout had stopped dropping on him: he could no longer hear it splashing on the surface. He saw himself floating endlessly from pit to pit, but he was too tired to be anxious about that. Xani’s corpse began one of its gaseous rolls beneath him, and he felt himself sliding off again, back down into the deep murk, into the comfort of the cold and the dark. He’d fought it so hard before, but he could no longer remember why. He knew that this time he would let himself go.

It was then, and only slowly, that he began to sense that he was not floating anymore. He lay faceup, with a pain in his back, breathing air. His elbow stirred. It made a rough, rasping sound—the first noise that was not gaseous or liquid he had heard in hours. He turned himself over with difficulty and stretched out his hands. The movement seemed to take minutes, as if he were rolling a huge stone uphill. He could no longer feel his hands, and to make them obey him he tried hard to imagine them there, at the end of his unfolding arms, groping weakly on the bricks.

With a slowness that was immeasurable, in the dark, he began to squirm up the conduit. It was hours before he remembered that he had to keep to the right. It was the first moment of real terror he had experienced since his ordeal began. Perhaps he had already missed a turn? He might have gone a hundred yards already, he might have gone five. He could no longer judge.

He saw Xani crawling up the pipe beside him, with his guts trailing in the water.

A blaze of magnificent fireworks went off inside his head.

He heard his old friend Palewski calling his name.

He crawled for a minute, then for a year, and after a night and a day Palewski was there, but very, very small, like a mouse in his little hole.

Palewski was shouting, and then Yashim was in a litter and was jouncing, jouncing over the cobblestones, retching and trembling and wishing he could simply die.

Like happy Xani. Big and fat and soft, twirling forever and forever in a little eddy underground.

B
UNDLED
into shawls, Yashim slept for sixteen hours. He woke to find Amélie beside him, reading a book.

“What you need,” she said, “is the old lady’s soup. I’ll fetch you some.”

When she had gone, Yashim tested his limbs: his joints were sore, he had some chafing on his chin and chest, and all his muscles ached, as if he had run a long way. He sat up, feeling weary. The thought of soup made him feel sick; but strangely, when Amélie presented him with the bowl, he found that he was starving.

“There’s no bread,” she said apologetically.

“It can be arranged,” Yashim said. “I’ll call the boy. You’ll find some money in that purse.”

He stuck his head out of the window. “Elvan!”

“Is this enough?” Amélie held up a coin.

Yashim nodded. “That will be enough.” He set the soup aside and closed his eyes.

Darkness. He was in the pit again. His limbs twitched. He opened his eyes and there was Amélie, the steaming bowl, his own room.

“The Gyllius. You read it?”

“Yes.”

“And it suggested—some idea?”

“Yes. I think so.”

Yashim closed his eyes again. He was very tired, but he was not afraid of the dark. He, above all people, could not be afraid of the dark.

Long ago, reaching manhood, he had stepped into a region that was darker than any tunnel underneath the city, an unrelieved blackness that ran through his veins and turned his eyes backward in their sockets. His despair had been a cell from which there was no escape at all: the prison of his own ruined body.

But in the end he had found a way. Not a way out, exactly, but a way, perhaps, of seeing in the dark. It made him useful. Yashim the eunuch: a guide when others fell into the darkness, too.

Until sometimes a woman came, beautiful, shedding her own light, a woman, perhaps, with brown eyes and a cloud of brown hair, who watched him as he slept. And fetched him soup. And who shed so much light that as she passed he was dazzled, blinded—and would stay blind, long after she had gone away. Groping in the dark, again.

It was not her fault.

Yashim opened his eyes. Amélie had her arm stretched out, and she was looking at her hand with a concentrated expression on her face, wiggling her fingers.

Then the coin fell to the floor. She bent to pick it up.

“The Great Church,” Amélie said, turning the coin around her thumb. “Aya Sofia.”

Elvan knocked on the door. Yashim sent him to the Libyan baker for a round of bread. He took the coin with a curious glance at Amélie, and sped off on his errand.

“The Byzantine Greeks believed in an old legend about Aya Sofia,” Amélie explained. “The legend was that one day an enemy would succeed in breaking into the city. Everything would appear lost—except that the enemy would never reach the Great Church. Before that happened, the archangel Gabriel would appear with a flaming sword and drive the invaders out.”

“Hmmm.” Yashim looked doubtful. “It didn’t happen.”

“No. But Max always said that every myth contains a kernel of truth. So when the Turks broke into the city there was, in fact, a miracle at Aya Sofia. Just not the miracle everyone hoped for.”

“No archangel.”

“No. But a priest, saying mass. When the Turks arrived, he vanished.”

“Vanished?”

“Stepped into one of the great pillars, apparently, carrying the Host. The legend goes that he’ll reappear on the day the cross is raised over the dome again.”

Yashim frowned. He tried to picture the scene: Ottoman troops crashing against the great doors of the church, the terrified people huddled inside for protection, and a priest at the altar with a cup and plate. Something about the picture in his mind was vaguely familiar: he couldn’t remember. Something he’d seen, perhaps? Something Lefèvre had said. But at that moment Elvan reappeared with the bread, and the memory was lost. Yashim gave him a few piastres, and he bowed out with unusual solemnity.

Instead, Yashim recalled a legend in Grigor’s book, about the emperor being turned to stone.

“Max thought those stories carried a message,” Amélie explained. “Perhaps the tale of the priest means that the Greeks had time to hide their treasure before the Turks came in. Aya Sofia is one of the biggest buildings on earth. The most ambitious building project in world history, after the Pyramids.”

She took a lock of hair and twisted it with a finger.

“But there’s no crypt in Aya Sofia. Most churches have crypts, to represent the world of the dead. At Aya Sofia they raised the largest dome in the world, like a microcosm of the universe—the whole of God’s creation. It’s odd if they didn’t build a crypt in there, as well.”

Yashim broke the bread and dipped it into his soup. “It’s said that Mehmed came into the Great Church the morning after the assault and found a soldier hacking at the marble floor. He was angry. He said: ‘You soldiers can take whatever you can carry, but the building belongs to God—and me.’ Aya Sofia was preserved.”

“Perhaps he knew there was something under there. But they never got an opportunity to look, did they? As far as I know, Aya Sofia hasn’t been touched now for four hundred years.”

“They added minarets,” Yashim pointed out.

“On the outside.”

They looked at each other.

“That trick,” Yashim said. “The trick you were doing with the coin. Where did you learn that?”

Amélie laughed. “I still haven’t. Max used to teach me, but I haven’t got the fingers for it, I suppose. He could make the coin run through his fingers and then—
pouf!
It vanished. Just like that priest.”

Yashim drank his soup. He put down the empty bowl. “Your husband—Max. Dr. Lefèvre. He was a doctor of archaeology, wasn’t he?”

Amélie looked surprised. “Of archaeology? He was an archaeologist, yes. But he started out in medicine. He was a doctor of medicine.”

“A doctor of medicine,” Yashim repeated slowly. “I had no idea.”

There was a knock on the door, and Palewski came in, fishing a green bottle out of his coat pocket.

He bowed to Amélie and then peered closely at Yashim.

“He seems to have been eating soup,” he said. He patted the bottle. “Brandy. Excellent with soup. Good for invalids. I thought he might be dead.”

“He’ll live,” Amélie said.

Palewski looked disappointed. “Brandy’s good for a wake. I thought we might sit around his corpse, remembering, madame.”

“I think I’m recovering,” Yashim said in a small voice.

Amélie laughed. She glanced from Yashim to Palewski, and flexed her back. “Madame Matalya will want her bowl back, Yashim. I’ll take it down—and I’m a little tired.”

When she had gone, the ambassador uncorked the brandy and poured two glasses.

“It’s not the first time that you’ve saved my life,” Yashim said.

Palewski dismissed him with a wave. “I’m not too busy at the moment.”

Yashim smiled. With the sultan dying, most ambassadors would be filing their reports and trying to sound out the crown prince. The Polish ambassador could afford to wait on events.

“I don’t quite understand why I found you crawling out of a tunnel, Yashim.”

Yashim told him. He told him about Shpëtin’s little tin ball and the siphon. He told him how he had got lost in the maze, and about Xani’s body floating in the pool. He told him, too, how he had escaped.

“So Xani’s dead. They followed him into the siphon, killed him, and threw him down the pipe?”

“What else would they do? The little boy was watching the door from the other side of the road.”

“He saw them go in—and come out. He knows who they are.”

“But he can’t speak, Palewski.”

The ambassador cracked his knuckles.

Yashim levered himself up on one elbow. “There’s another thing. Amélie—Madame Lefèvre—read the Gyllius book. It gave her an idea.”

“The serpents’ heads?”

“Aya Sofia.”

Palewski shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Gyllius mentions the serpents’ heads—but they were still in their place on the column when he was here. And in Delmonico’s time, too. That little book doesn’t tell us anything important about the serpents’ heads, Palewski. So why was it so important to Lefèvre?”

“I don’t know. But if it wasn’t the serpents’ heads, why would he have needed Xani? And then, why was Xani murdered, too?”

Yashim ran his hands through his hair. “Xani. Amélie. Gyllius’s book. I feel as though I’m trying to re-create a rare and astonishing dish from a memory of how it tasted, Palewski. We have all these ingredients in the dish—but the flavor’s wrong, somehow.” He looked up. “Amélie told me something just now. Lefèvre was a real doctor. Not a doctor of archaeology.”

“A doctor. So what?”

“I’m not sure. He spoke Greek fluently, too. Modern Greek. He learned it in the twenties, in the Greek provinces.”

“Are you sure? There was a war going on at the time.”

“Missilonghi, yes. That’s what interests me. Your poet—Byron, Millingen, his doctor.”

“Byron,” Palewski echoed. “It’s Thursday, Yashim. I’ve got an idea.”

“Thursday?” Yashim frowned. It was a ritual, their Thursday dinner; but time was short.

“I’m sorry, but I haven’t—”

“No, no, Yash. It’s quite all right. Tonight, for once, you’ll dine with me.”